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POZ Temporality - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The present is not only anti-future. Poz temporality uses the present to mourn silence and stigma.
        Mourning becomes part of method, not a detour from analysis.
        
        Smilges & Crip Negativity
        
        “Negativity gives me time to mourn. It lets me feel my bad crip feelings as cripply as I want” (Smilges, 2023, pp. 25–26).
        
        And:
        
        “breathe myself out of the past” (Smilges, 2023, p. 26).
    - - Difference between nostalgia and crip negativity
        
        the past can foster “fears of disability…often bound up in a kind of compulsory nostalgia for the lost able mind/ body” (Kafer, 2013, p. 43).
        
        However, resisting nostalgia at all costs means we can't critically examine ourselves as majoritarian subjects; it means we can't do the work of working on and against our earlier selves. We can and should look at the past--and we can even mourn in the present what we lost--while critically examining the conditions that make us nostalgic for that space and time.
        
        the function of building utopia should move “beyond some nostalgic past that perhaps never was or some future whose arrival is continuously belated–a utopia in the present” (Muñoz, 2009, p.37).
      - Crip negativity prioritizes the present. Present tense rarely prioritized in AIDS Cultural Production. Mourning and prioritizing the present tense is radical!
      - When you are first diagnosed, there is going to be a mourning period. While it is going to look different based on access for meds, mine started with being freaked out that I was going to die. Then, when I realized POZ wasn't a death sentence if you have access to meds, I started mourning because I knew the false assumptions I made may be what others had made making it hard to build future relationships. Plus, knowing that I would have to come out as POZ and becoming more aware of the stigma that exists, that I internalized, and that others undoubtedly internalized as well was overwhelming.
        
        "Sometimes I feel like queer and crip politics oriented toward the horizon or toward futurity don’t let me sit long enough in my grief" (Smilges, p.25)
        
        Doesn't disavow futurity, but as way to highlight why the present still matters.
        
        Sarah Ahmed’s (2017) gestures toward a similar rhythm, even if from a different positionality: “Feminism is DIY: a form of self-assembly. No wonder feminist work is often about timing: sometimes we are too fragile to do this work; we cannot risk being shattered because we are not ready to put ourselves back together again. To get ready often means being prepared to be undone.” (p. 27). Though Ahmed writes within a feminist frame, her attention to readiness, repair, and self-assembly resonates with Smilges’s call to prioritize the present, its grief, and not rush towards the horizon until our mindbodies are ready.
  - - - Futurity is useful when it imagines otherwise.Poz temporality asks what futures are possible while remaining poz.
    - - Futurity is dangerous when it becomes curative time.
- - - - embarrassment, recognition, mourning
      - critique of absorbed stigma
        
        Can be a critique of the self, but also of the media ecology forming those stigma.
        
        Critiquing yourself solely and not balancing the broader ecology you exist within could risk promoting a neoliberal idea of self-responsibility.
  - - - disidentification with hostile/inadequate media complicated by former distance from poz identity
        
        (DIS) working on and against the text
        (POZ) working on and against the earlier self
- - - - AIDS Activist Videos
      - Events like protests
        
        This includes non-splashy ones typically associated with ACT UP and ones that may prioritize care more
      - Spaces like AIDS memorials
      - Ideas learned from within and outside of community
        
        Outside is the moment where you explore yourself exploring ideas that form via mass culture.
      - More on what cultural production entails - “work that takes place primarily outside the realms of science and government (although it may speak to these institutions). This means we are invested in harder-to-quantify labor output of artists, activists, care workers, archivists, and thinkers. Taking place in the fields of arts, humanities, health, and advocacy, we meet in our “AIDS work.” (p. 3)
- - - - I want poz temporality to work in a similar way: not as a destination or totalizing theory of time, but as a point of departure for thinking about how poz people make sense of the before and after of diagnosis, the media that shaped us, and the futures we are still trying to imagine.
      - Because our embodied relationships to disability, AIDS cultural production, poz status, diagnosis, access, stigma, race, gender, sexuality, and memory vary so widely, poz temporality cannot be fixed or universal. It should function as a working framework that shifts depending on the person, body, archive, and media ecology being read